Friday, August 23, 2013

"Good As Gone"

Douglas Corleone is the author of contemporary crime novels published by St. Martin’s Minotaur. His debut novel One Man's Paradise was a finalist for the 2010 Shamus Award for Best First Novel and won the 2009 Minotaur Books / Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award. His third novel Last Lawyer Standing is his latest book featuring criminal defense attorney Kevin Corvelli.

It was nearing 11:00 p.m. when we entered the underground station. We stopped at an electronic ticket machine and purchased two one-day travel cards, then waited ten minutes on a platform with a smattering of other people until a mustard-yellow train arrived right on time. The train itself smelled of skunked beer, and looking around it was easy to see why. Of the dozen passengers nine were teenage boys, each with a large brown paper bag sitting between his thighs.

The paragraph above could be set in just about any major city in the world. Former U.S. Marshal Simon Fisk and a local private investigator are traveling through the city at night, searching for information on a young American girl who was abducted from her parents’ hotel room in Paris. Simon’s journey takes him across the continent, and places him in some of Europe’s ritziest night clubs and seediest back alleys. On page 69, Simon happens to be in Berlin, Germany, but what quickly becomes clear in this international thriller is that there is darkness in every city, that evil lurks in every part of the world, from the City of Light to the piers abutting the Black Sea in Odessa, the Ukrainian city widely known as the capital of sex tourism – and sex trafficking – in Eastern Europe. In that respect, page 69 of Good As Gone is representative of the entire novel. Readers who open the book to page 69 will soon be transported to Tunnelbar, where they’ll meet a Turkish heroin dealer named Alim, who might just know more about the young American girl’s disappearance than he initially lets on.